Dimitrov - Together and by Ourselves

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We hope you enjoy these poems. This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Copper Canyon Press would like to thank Constellation Digital Services for their partnership in making this e-book possible.

You Were Blond Once I have a photograph when I describe it, youll know.

On a long train ride they sat and said nothing. In a pocket, a ticket stub of two hours on a night five years ago. If you left your life, what life would you leave for? Tell me. A lot of terrible things used to make me happy. For years, my friend looked for the perfect chair, that space he wanted to be in. Found it two summers agonever sits in it.

They sat in the back of the restaurant so he could be upset privately and in public. You know those streets that have two names, one before and one after they intersect with another? How sometimes we cant find them on maps. Well, I got lost every day that summer in London. Its the kind of film you want to see by yourself,but take a car home, dont get lost on me. None of this is importantand still I have a photograph of you when we ate an orange in bed. What month was that in? What did you want from me? Every book is a book, is a thing you feel by yourself. You are here.

I am alone in this poem. The window open all day: rain on the white desk, wood floor, that strange curve on the back of your head (only I knew). Sometimes I go outside just to feel movement. Is that why you live here?Did you imagine your life would turn out this way? It takes the way someone asks a question to know if you really want to know them. You were blond once. So handsome.

And the streets kept their names, and that restaurant closed and I found the right film when I needed nothing. Where is he going with this? Where were you? How you approached the water and never went in it. Im telling you its not cold. Its not cold anymore. Today its perfect out there. The teas tea, theres work, pills, unsent messages, empty glasses. A lot of things to say with one body (unlikely).

It wasnt that long ago. I have a photograph of you from that day I Together and by Ourselves I opened the window so I could hear people. Last night we were together and by ourselves. You. You look and look at Diver for Crane by Johns and want to say something. In the water you are a child without eyes.

Yesterday there was nothing on the beach and no one knows where it came from. Theres a small animal lodged somewhere inside us. There are minutes of peace. Just the feel. Just this once. Where does the past, where should the period go? What is under the earth followed them home.

The branch broke. It broke by itself. It did break, James. We were there and on silent. We were delete, shift, command. Missing everywhere and unwrittensuddenlyall at once. Him. Him.

He misses a person and she is still living. I havent missed you for long and you are so gone. Then he stepped away from the poem midsentence we must have been lonely people to say those things then. But there are rooms for us now and sculptures to look at. In the perfect field someone has left everything including themselves. You.

You should stay here. Its a brutal and beautiful autumn. With his hands in the sand, on the earth, under time he touched something else. People are mostly what they cant keep and keeps them. And inside the cage of the Ferris wheel you saw the world. In the steam, on the mirror: you wrote so so so... so if youre looking for answers youre looking at every water tower around here.

Why does the sea hold what it loves most below? Fear. Hopeless money. All the news and the non-news. How could anyone anywhere know us? What did we make? And the leather of your chairit has me marked so good luck forgetting. The world was a home. It was cruel.

It was true. It was not realistic. Make sure you date and sign here then save all the worn things. Because everyone wants to know when it was, how it happenedsay something about it. How the night hail made imprints all over. Our things.

Our charming and singular things. Always Were good at keeping how we shouldnt feel. On the ferry to the island I burned alone that way. At least, he thought, there ll be an earth to sink in. The last scenes in Shakespeare I forget to breathe. When history caught up with us: no less cruel than our parents.

Wanted to tell you of the psychic witch who found my life with one eye though we werent speaking then and here youre dead. Ive put a period to end each thought that wont end. Come into my house (they were) and talk to me about another life. The park is true and in perpetual August. Yes, Im late and going, going back there. Traces. Traces.

Spit on the sidewalk. Im an adult and feel less urgent every day. No ones number matters but the voices anchor; and the coolness at the bottom of a memory or how people stop to watch the moon together. Finally knowing you, I know I cannot know you. This bodys terrible at your religion. And why eternal life if pleasures time-bound and each new years a killing he said, the dead are one long summer.

Walking, going nowhere and some punctuation in an emailed note reminds me who I am more so than what Ive written. I would pause for you and be a million commas. The way a flock of birds will leave a tree. Not just the sound or lifting. Thats where I want to put my hands inside you. And I found it on a train, beside lit pools, passing mountains near the city dust between the ribs or where the dusk waits.

I gave my life a real nice show. And then you went away so I could see you as graffiti in a bar just once. A man is stepping on the moon. The earth or your one life is gone. The phone rings in your leaving. Let your black hair, let your black hair get in my way always.

Seduction and Its Immediate Consequences One April in autumn you were my story for hours. The silence of those days became like a shirt. His screaming fits were nothing other than attempts at seduction, writes Freud in The Wolfman. How many accounts for how many things and what did we own? In the movie of their lives there were people they saw like notes in the margins and in the vials a bright mess they carried inside. Michael, Michael, Michael. If a name is said enough times in a poem something will happen.

But that isnt your name and it isnt a city, so where do you live? Winter taught me to wear a very thin nothing those evenings. When the car sped through the tunnel, when the cemetery filled with the living, when the drink was named for what they couldnt quite taste. And you didnt decide on the friends or the lovers, the shoes or the card that was sent and said